https://mechanicalsnail.com/tags/system-design/Recent content in System Design on Mechanical Snailhttps://mechanicalsnail.com/images/logo.pnghttps://mechanicalsnail.com/images/logo.pngHugo -- 0.152.2en-usMon, 24 Nov 2025 10:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/wire-formats-rust/Mon, 24 Nov 2025 10:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/wire-formats-rust/Choosing a wire format at scale: JSON, Protocol Buffers, Cap'n Proto, FlatBuffers, Avro and MessagePack compared on payload size, encode/decode cost, and schema evolution.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/mcp-server-golang-social-media/Tue, 25 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/mcp-server-golang-social-media/Building a Model Context Protocol server in Go: JSON-RPC tool definitions, social graph traversal, role-based access control with inheritance, and idempotent moderation operations.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/caching/Fri, 14 Feb 2025 12:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/caching/A survey of production caching strategies: cache-aside, read-through, write-through and write-back, LRU and friends as eviction policies, and the consistency trade-offs each one implies.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/recommendation-systems-part5/Wed, 10 Jul 2024 13:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/recommendation-systems-part5/Part 5 of 6: a reference feed-ranking architecture — request flow, latency budgets, ads blending, two-tower retrieval and ranking implementations, and production monitoring.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/recommendation-systems-part1/Wed, 10 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/recommendation-systems-part1/Part 1 of 6: the multi-stage architecture of a production recommendation system — candidate retrieval, embedding-based nearest neighbour search, and feature engineering at scale.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/social-media-architecture/Sun, 08 Oct 2023 13:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/social-media-architecture/Systems architecture for an Instagram-scale social platform: fan-out on write versus read, graph sharding, feed caching, and absorbing celebrity-tier traffic spikes.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/actors/Sun, 17 Apr 2022 15:44:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/actors/How the Actor Model replaces shared memory with message passing: its origins in Erlang, supervision trees, mailbox semantics, and where actors fit in modern distributed systems.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/financial-dsl-rust/Thu, 29 Apr 2021 12:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/financial-dsl-rust/Designing a type-safe DSL in Rust for valuing futures and forwards: the pricing mathematics, a typed expression language, and an evaluation engine for portfolios of thousands of instruments.